|
WillyTrolove.com |
|
Get off the grass By Willy Trolove 6 July 2006
I love Wimbledon. The hush of the crowd. The thwock of tennis ball on catgut. The masculine grunts of the lady players. Most of all, I love the grass. In tennis, grass is the only surface that counts. You can win the US Open or the ASB Classic or the Motonau mid-week naked mixed-doubles, but if you don’t win on grass you’re not a real tennis player. You’re just someone who can hit a ball. Grass is the great equaliser. If you played the world’s top seeds on asphalt or clay you wouldn’t win a point. You’d spend the game cowering behind your racquet and calling for the good Lord to deliver you from injury. But if you played them on grass there’s a chance that, at some point, the bounce would surprise them. Instead of returning your lollipop serve with bullet-like accuracy, they’d maim some poor sod seven rows back who’d only turned up to see Maria Sharapova’s underpants. To win on grass you need more than technical superiority. You need luck and a touch of the sublime. No matter how well the court is groomed there will always be a flaw that can make the ball bounce against you. It might be a single blade of uncut grass. It might be a lonely thistle. It might even be a hoofmark. We had a court like that once. We lived on a farm and the court was made from grass for the simple reason that grass-seed was tax-deductible whereas Astroturf wasn’t. For most of the year the court was as soft as blancmange, but in the summer it firmed. For a few glorious weeks it was a new Wimbledon, where a barefoot Becker battled Llendl, where Evert-Lloyd took on Navratilova, where McEnroe got sent to his bedroom for swearing at his sister. On one side of the court was a rhododendron so big it had a gravitational pull. Balls, pets and unwary houseguests tangled themselves in its extents with hardly any effort on their part. On the other side were rosebushes that ate children. Not surprisingly, we learnt to keep the ball on the court in even the fiercest crosswind. One winter’s evening the cows got out. They thundered up the drive and over the tennis court in search of my mother’s geraniums. They found them. They also found the hydrangas, the silverbeet and anything else that could be digested with four stomachs. Eventually they were persuaded to leave with words that McEnroe dared not use. Satiated and moving fast, they thundered off into the night like truckies after an all-you-can-eat buffet. Summer came. The hoofmarks hardened. The court was even more of an equaliser than usual. You’d get yourself in position to return a serve only to have the ball bounce off a hoofmark and sock you in the jaw, thump you in the stomach, or knee you in the groin. Matches that should have been one-sided went to tie-breakers. The players stood in one place and refused to budge for fear they’d step in a hoofmark and dislocate a hip.
It wasn’t quite Wimbledon. But then, as I found out later, sometimes Wimbledon isn’t quite Wimbledon. In 2001 I arrived in London on the day of the men’s final. Rain postponed the match and it was rescheduled for the following afternoon. Every seat in Centre Court was up for sale so I went along to try and get in. The entire Australian population of London had the same idea. Pat Rafter was playing, and the queue outside the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club was one long line of ockers in yellow and gold, yelling “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” at the top of their IQs. Two hours later I was up the back of Centre Court, watching Rafter serve to the Croatian wildcard entry, Goran Ivanisevic. The place looked so familiar that I thought I’d been there before - the green grandstands, the ring of line judges, the absurdly energetic ballboys. All was as it should be, except for the hush. The Aussie crowd thought it was at a football game, shouting, stomping, and breaking every rule of acceptable spectator behaviour. But it didn’t matter. This was one of the greatest and most equal games of tennis ever played. For more than three hours, Ivanisevic and Rafter wrestled each other for every point, every game, every set, until the sixteenth game of the fifth set, when Ivanisevic finally pulled two games ahead, and collapsed in ecstasy. After the prizegiving the dejected Australians filed out of the stadium and I made my way down to inspect the famous grass surface that had been the perfect equaliser. I looked, and then looked again. I saw single blades of uncut grass. I saw a lonely thistle. But, alas, for the life of me, I could not see any hoofmarks. |
|
WillyTrolove.com
|
|
© Willy Trolove 2006 |
|
EMAIL Willy Trolove |
|
RECEIVE Willy’s columns by email If you enjoyed this piece, you can sign up to receive Willy’s regular columns in your inbox. Visit the homepage for more details |
|
These columns first appeared in the Christchurch Press, the Dominion Post, the New Zealand Herald or the Otago Daily Times |
